Excursus: “Mere High-Flown Fantasy …?” (Kant on Holiday)

Abstract

From Rousseau’s impassioned critique, and his ardent, affective, and creative fictions, I move, but without quite coming back to earth, to Immanuel Kant, abstemious, austere, literally self-denying, who, like Hobbes, I see as a further (but also potentially productive) writer of disciplinary and didactic fictions. I again pose the dual question of what modes of imagining underlie theoretical world creation, and what those imaginings make possible. In fact, opinion is sharply divided, and the innocent reader casually glancing through the books on the library shelves may find herself somewhat bewildered that, in addition to all the various dualisms that organize Kant’s texts, curiously, Kant himself seems to have left a bifurcated or dualistic legacy to modern philosophy; or rather, she may find herself unsure as to which is the real Kant, and which the doppelganger (the double or forbidding ghostly apparition …?). For example, Nietzsche sinisterly (or perhaps impishly, but most likely both) writes that Kant’s “categorical imperative gives off a whiff of cruelty,” and for Theodor Adorno, Kant is “repressive.”1 And yet, in an altogether different tenor and key, Ernst Bloch claims for Kant’s categorical imperative the attempt to think “a Humanum which is so little merely abstractly general and so clearly also anticipatorily general that it is not accommodated with its human landscape in any class society.” For Bloch, the categorical imperative contains a utopian forward impulse toward solidarity and away from violence, so that it “seems almost like an anticipatory formula directed toward a non-antagonistic society, that is, to a classless one, in which real generality of moral legislation is possible for the very first time.”2

Keywords

Coherence Excavation Stake Univer Metaphor

The true world—unattainable, indemonstrable, unpromisable; but the very thought of it— a consolation, an obligation, an imperative.

(At bottom, the old sun, but seen through mist and skepticism. The idea has become elusive, pale, Nordic, Königsbergian.)

Nietzsche, “How the ‘True World’ Finally Became a Fable,” in Twilight of the Idols

Not magnitude, not lavishness,

But form—the site;

Not innovating wilfulness,

But reverence for the archetype.

Herman Melville, “Greek Architecture,” in The Norton Anthology of Poetry

everything goes past like a river and the changing tastes and various shapes of men make the whole game uncertain and delusive. Where do I find fixed points in nature, which cannot be moved by man, and where I can indicate the markers by the shore to which he ought to adhere?

hand-written by Immanuel Kant, in his Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime

Stanley Fish, Doing What Comes Naturally: Change, Rhetoric and the Practice of Theory in Literary and Legal Studies (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), pp.342–343. I have insisted that this book is neither “pro-foundationalism” nor “anti-foundationalism,” since to organize this field into camps—to create the foundationalist moment as singular and monolithic—is to miss the moment of rupture that comes from reading foundations. To be simply anti-foundationalist is to presuppose and work to create the very monolith of foundationalism. I would rather, as I have suggested already, maintain the status of the “always already” fictive quality of foundations; this nevertheless means occasionally drawing on the kinds of characterizations such as Fish provides.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

Since the Groundwork, although short, is a remarkably dense text, and since this is merely an excursus, I have taken the liberty of bypassing the vast amounts of secondary literature on Kant. However, I must acknowledge my debts to the following accounts: Howard Williams, Kant’s Political Philosophy (Oxford: Blackwell, 1983);Google Scholar

Andrew Kaufman, “Reason, Self-Legislation and Legitimacy: Conceptions of Freedom in the Political Thought of Rousseau and Kant,” in, The Review of Politics 59/1 (Winter 1997) pp.25–52.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

On this classical account of positive and negative freedom, where to be positively free is to be governed by the rational self, see Isaiah Berlin’s essays on liberty: Four Essays on Liberty (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979). While dealing with the problems this account generates is beyond the confines of this book, I would simply like to note that Kant seems to confer agency on rationality and willing that is beyond the boundaries of the self.Google Scholar

63.

William Sokoloff, “Kant and the Paradox of Respect,” in, American Journal of Political Science 45/4 (October 2001), pp.768–779, 770.CrossRefGoogle Scholar